I’ve been playing around with bash for the past two years now, and found some of these keyboard shortcuts to be very useful. I’ve tried to put the ones I use the most often on here. For other cool bash shortcuts and tricks, visit
- CTRL + R: Reverse search through history for a previously used command;
- CTRL + A: Moves your cursor to the beginning of the current line;
- CTRL + E: Moves your cursor to the end of the current line;
- ALT + F: Moves your cursor forward one word on the current line;
- ALT + B: Moves your cursor backward one word on the current line;
- CTRL + W: Deletes the word before the cursor;
- ESC + D: Deletes the word after the cursor;
- CTRL + U: Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line;
- CTRL + K: Clears the line after the cursor;
- CTRL + C: Kills the current running process;
- CTRL + Z: Suspends the current job and runs it as a background process;
- TAB: Auto-complete files and folder names;
For the sake of completeness, I’ve added these other shortcuts that I saw on another website. However, I find that I do not use those on a regular basis. In reality, there are plenty more bash keyboard shortcuts around, but I just never bothered trying them out yet… For a much more extensive list of shortcuts (way too extensive for my tastes), visit web hosting uk‘s blog post on the subject.
- CTRL + L: Clears the Screen (I use the “clear” command);
- CTRL + H: Same as backspace;
- CTRL + D: Exit the current shell (I type “exit” in Putty);
- CTRL + T: Swaps the last two characters before the cursor;
- ESC + T: Swaps the last two words before the cursor;
- CTRL + XX: Moves between end-of-line and current cursor position;
- CTRL + Y: Recovers previous deletion (Not file deletion!);
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I never got around to actually learning these until I saw this post! thanks mig!
Hey Bert,
I’m glad you found those useful. I find, with bash shortcuts, you never bother to learn them because you don’t think it’ll save that much time. But once you know them, you can’t really live without them. They’re a real time saver!